About

Lori A. Custodero, D.M.A., is an Associate Professor of Music Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the relationships between musical experience and human development in various settings, including classrooms, public spaces, and family environments. She has conducted studies on children’s engagement with music through the lenses of musical parenting, reciprocal influence, creativity, and flow experience. Her current work explores how adults construct their sense of musical self based on their perceived influences of childhood environments, experiences, and dispositions for musicality. Custodero is widely published, with more than 40 journal articles and book chapters authored or co-authored. She is the co-editor of 'Issues in Music Education: Contemporary Theory and Practice,' alongside Harold Abeles. She has served in leadership roles and collaborated on projects both nationally and internationally. Her pedagogical scholarship is applied locally through programs such as WeBop! at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Columbia Head Start, and The New York Philharmonic’s Very Young People’s Concerts. Recently, she designed and implemented a national program for teaching artists that engages experienced educators in reflective practice and connects pedagogy to responsive art making. She holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Redlands, an M.A. in Music from California State University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Southern California.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Art
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Visual arts
• Philosophy
• Developmental psychology
• Mathematics education
• Linguistics
• History
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• Epilogue: Childhoods in Flux: Considering Consequences of a Global Pandemic

  2024-03-29

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Subject Music Psychology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

  PublisherDOI

• Copyright Page

  2024-03-29

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2024 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form

  PublisherDOI

• The Musical Legacies of Childhood and Children

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We rely on our memories of childhood and our experiences with children to help us retain or recapture a profound expression of musical experience. Looking at the autobiographical data, we might critically examine our own positionality: “How can we monitor the influence/power we have on the creation of musician identity in our students?” and “How are these questions answered in my own past and how does that affect my teaching?” Thinking about how creative musicians see children, we might ask more generative questions: “What is my student doing with the musical material?” or “What does my student most need to know [to follow the musical trajectory they have started]?” The book ends with a call to see the child as musical being so that we can envision their creative potential, and respect their individual, cultural, and evolving ways of being.

  PublisherDOI

• Foreword

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract The Resonant Legacies of Childhoods and Children In a recent video interview (https://www.youtube.com/@pennstate) where I was asked to discuss a personal passion, I talked about the joy I find in playing music. In the piece, the video producers elicited from me the kind of musical autobiography that forms the source material for much of the scholarship shared in this book. I offered that I have been a fan of popular music as long as I could remember, following the example set by my father. Born in Queens, New York, in 1922, he, along with his neighborhood friends, was drawn to the sound and spectacle of swing music. Guided by his more knowledgeable peers, he learned to play drums, found his way into a neighborhood big band, and at twenty years old was on his way to becoming a union musician. World War II then intervened. By the time I was born in the early 1960s, my father had become a veteran of the US Navy, gone through college on the GI bill, established a career as a social worker, and, so far as I know, never again was a member of a band. However, throughout my entire childhood, the southeast corner of our basement was fully occupied by his champagne sparkle Gretsch drum kit. Every weekend, without fail, he would find the time to cue up a thick stack of big band LPs on his enormous console stereo (Basie, Dorsey, Ellington, Miller, etc.) and play along for ninety minutes like the Krupa-inspired rhythm king that he had been and still was.

  PublisherDOI

• Musical Pathways

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Dispositions and identities are not fixed; they are vulnerable to circumstances both professional and personal. This chapter traces how musicians’ experiences engendered changes in life paths, and how both uncontrollable conditions and intentional choices redirected musical lives. Disruption is from the Latin word for “break”: examples of disruption include injuries, lack of teacher-student rapport, or losing an important audition or competition. Renewal refers to restoring, re-establishing, or returning—a making new. It is often an outcome of disruption that moves us to change—leading us to new paths or perspectives. Autobiographers shared stories of connections with others in moments of grief, celebration, and protest. In this way, music itself serves to both disrupt the status quo and renew our sense of unity, mutuality, and belonging.

  PublisherDOI

• “Prelude to a Method”

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter begins with an homage to Edith Cobb. Margaret Mead suggests an aesthetic representation of Cobb’s work as a mosaic, a bringing together several data sources: creative adults’ autobiographies, observations of children at play, and quotations. The data presented in this chapter include similar pieces, yet those arrangements often mix into new forms with changes in position and context; such variability suggests an image that could shuffle pieces into different combinations to reflect change—more like a kaleidoscope. Further exploration of this metaphor yields understanding of how combinations of memories, present experiences, and projection of future opportunities may coalesce into a sense of self and a musical identity. At its best, this sense of self is both individually coherent (noting similar dispositions over the lifespan) and continuously evolving over time, responding to patterns of influence within social settings, changing developmental and sociocultural trends, and musical contexts. As we turn the kaleidoscope, we can see permutations of possibility in how musical lives are constructed.

  PublisherDOI

• Before We Teach Music

  2024-03-29 · 23 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Music is a human activity—a social phenomenon, functioning as a means of comfort, expression, and communication that serves us throughout our lifespan—and one of the few activities that can be meaningful for an eight-week-old infant as well as an octogenarian. This book examines childhood as a site where enculturation mixes with individual experience to create foundational ways of being musical. Through accessing interdisciplinary scholarship and multiple sources of data, this volume reveals how our capacities to live musically and to cultivate a musical life are derived from the legacies of childhood. Within this book, the reader will find excerpted musical autobiographies culled from over 200 music education graduate students as a way to understand the variability of “how music means” within broadly conceived developmental contexts: early childhood memories of music evoked strong associations with family members; dispositional practices and expressions of musical identities surfaced in memories of middle childhood; and strong memories of disruption, renewal, and resistance around musical trajectories occurred mainly in later adolescence and early adulthood. These stories are meant to generate the reader’s own recollections and provoke a process of self-reflection on how the past informs the present, and how our current actions help shape future experiences. The book addresses what parents, teachers, performers, and composers learn from their encounters with children; they speak with much passion of how their enthusiastic discovery of what to us seems mundane can renew a sense of wonder and curiosity that fuels creative and ethical work.

  PublisherDOI

• Encounters with Children

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In studies of musical parenting, researchers have found parents to have a natural tendency to share musical experiences with their infants and young children. Conrad provides a comparative analysis of Darwin’s diary and his published scientific report of his own infant’s development. In his diary, there was a change from “detached observer” to “embodied participant” that involved reciprocal actions and acknowledgment. This exchange with young children produces an unmasking of the objective, distantly academic, and controlled persona, revealing a vulnerability to surprise and delight. Such a response may perhaps best be described as enchantment, which, Bennett writes, is “to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and every day.” A case study of the Scottish Opera’s creation for infants called BambinO draws from interviews and focus groups with the composer, director, stage manager, instrumentalists, and singers. Their experiences of mutuality and enchantment provide support for the impact of being with children.

  PublisherDOI

• Musical Beings

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Childhood is a critical period in which music functions to cultivate relationships, support dispositions, and encourage experiences of expression and communication. It also provides a means through which children can be agents in their own self-regulation and comfort. Reflecting on our past experiences in childhood and attending to our immediate experiences with children provide a foundation for sympathetic responsiveness to children’s needs and awareness of (previously hidden) capabilities. The chapter illuminates how and why we are musical beings; how the temporal, dynamic, social, and physical properties of music are aligned with qualities of human existence; and how they are manifested in children’s capabilities for embodiment. Given the broad expanse of music both in everyday life and in its function as a tool for intensifying as well as transcending the present moment, it is important to consider its role in shaping us and the groups to which we belong.

  PublisherDOI

• A Sense of Musical Self

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Our childhood memories can tell us about the ways in which our sense of music develops vis-à-vis dispositions and identities. Dispositions involve the natural inclination toward certain behaviors, which situate us in relationship to music and to others. The concept of musician is recollected at about the age children start attending school, perhaps due to school being one of the first places we are introduced to peers, who bring a variety of often unfamiliar experiences, allowing us to begin seeing our own dispositions as distinctive. Early dispositions for music were also recollected in stories that involved embodiment, reflecting mimesis, an effort to get inside, to become the musical sounds, or emulation, involving trying on various models of music making in our environment. Young children’s identification with music often takes the form of engagement in imaginative play, reconstructing familiar scenes, taking on roles of parent, teacher, and rock star.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elissa Johnson-Green

  University of Massachusetts Lowell

  3 shared

• Claudia Calì

  Queens College, CUNY

  2 shared

• Donna Brink Fox

  2 shared

• Diane Persellin

  2 shared

• Rachel Nardo

  2 shared

• Anna Neumann

  1 shared

• Katie Kresek

  1 shared

• Lelouda Stamou

  University of Macedonia

  1 shared

Education

• B.A.

  University of Redlands

• M.A.

  California State University

• Other

  University of Southern California